I, Lobster: A Crustacean Odyssey

Introduction

Introduction I am sitting at a window in Waldoboro, Maine, looking out at the Medomak River. The powdery blue sky is banked with lowlying clouds edged in gray and pink. It’s four o’clock on January 25, 2008. The temperature is zero and falling. About an hour ago a bald eagle flew toward the opposite shore, skimming down to the water’s surface before vanishing on the far side of a small island. It’s high tide. The river is empty. No birds or seals or boats are visible now, but mainly it is forlorn because the lobster buoys have been taken away. I’m so used to seeing them bob, decorating the river like lollipops. But the lobsters started heading out to deeper ocean hideouts in the fall, and by early November the Medomak lobstermen and women were pulling their traps out of the water. It will be early May before our river starts coming back to life. The lobsters are gone, true, but they still have my undivided attention . A few years ago I started thinking about occurrences of lobsters in art, literature, and history. I already had several notions about them in my mind, as most art historians would. Lobsters are almost a cliché when you start looking at seventeenth-century still-life paintings from Europe because lobsters epitomized luxury in the Low Countries where those paintings flourished. One purpose of the still life was to simultaneously celebrate the widespread taste for opulence and materialism among members of the new merchant class and scold them for it. When I am not in Waldoboro, I live near Amherst, Massachusetts ,where I pay regular visits to one of the most stunning of such paintings: Frans Snyders’s epic Still Life, which belongs to Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum. In the painting’s cast of characters are heroic animals, most dead—including a doe, a swan, and a peacock—and two live hunting dogs still nervous from the intensity of the chase. In the background an apprehensive servant carries a large charger with a huge boar’s head. But mainly it is the lobster—brilliant red, its beady eye nearly burning a hole in the canvas—that makes the scene roar with sensual excess.1 2 , i , l o b s t e r I loved those still lifes with lobsters when I was a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst more than a decade ago (after a career in journalism), but even then I think they set off a silent alarm in my mind. Whether surrounded by silver or gold pitchers and platters, bright oranges and gleaming grapes, silks and velvets, or hunters’ dead game, the lobster stands out as an anomaly—often the only sea animal, and cooked at that. Still, my attention wandered elsewhere, and the concept of selfportraiture was the subject of my dissertation. In 2001 my husband and I bought our house on the Medomak River, a rich lobster fishing ground. The full lobster alert didn’t actually sound for me until the fall of 2006. It was tripped during discussions of Trevor Corson’s fascinating The Secret Life of Lob‑ sters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean.2 My thoughts lurched back to those show-stopping lobsters, and I knew there was much more to them than meets the eye. So began my research project. First, I looked for images of lobsters , and before long I had over two hundred on my computer— starting with an ancient Roman wall mosaic of fishermen standing in their boats on a sea teeming with life. A lobster has pride of place in the center of the composition; it is the same size as the boats that surround it. Later, I found several paintings of imagined Roman feasts painted from the Renaissance on, in which the lobster platter was the magnet, the pièce de résistance. Whole red lobsters are the aesthetic rule,even though,as almost everyone knows, red lobsters are usually dead lobsters. There are the standout works by famous Renaissance, baroque, and modern artists (including Picasso, Willem de Kooning, and Salvador Dalí). In addition, some oddities—even favorites—in my collection include a beautiful,moody,and very strange early-nineteenthcentury watercolor by Charles-Frédéric Soehnée of a man riding a lobster, slouched like a weary cowboy, though his eccentric, burnoose -style outfit makes him look as if he should be riding...